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I was hoping I could use Netscape Navigator to go to Hacker News and post a comment from it, but it has no network connection. And I guess it probably wouldn't

I was hoping I could use Netscape Navigator to go to Hacker News and post a comment from it, but it has no network connection. And I guess it probably wouldn't be able to HTTPS.

lostgame 5y ago
I’m sorry this is so vague, I’m in transit right now; so I’m a little lazy to try to Google this from my phone - but there is some sort of proxy-type thing for these old Macs that allows you to use the ‘modern web’, to an…extent? I think it kinda works the way Opera Mini does or something, if that makes sense? It does totally solve the HTTPS issue. You could easily access HN using this method through even Netscape. There is also - I want to say - again pardon me if I’m wrong here, but I believe it’s called ‘Classzilla’? This is for - AFAIK - at least MacOS 9 (you might be screwed for 8, though) and does old.Reddit.com pretty okay for me as long as I have enough RAM in the unit, so it should also handle HN totally fine. I actually think it - along with, unfortunately; an absolutely incredible modern Firefox port for PPC Macs running 10.4/10.5 called ‘TenFourFox’, are now abandoned - but very much still available. It was a pretty big hit to the (admittedly small) PPC Mac community when it happened. I personally still use TenFourFox almost every day as I use my PPC Mac collection often for various tasks, especially my quad G5 that has 16GB(!) RAM. (Yeah, a PPC Mac with I believe 2 processors/4 G5 cores at 2.5(?)ghz, 2 512 GB SSD’s and 16GB of RAM. There is literally no better way to experience the heights of the PPC Mac days. So cool.)
- simulate-me 5y ago
  I believe some people have written WASM networking using a WebRTC data channel as the transport.
- ivank 5y ago
  https://github.com/tenox7/wrp https://github.com/tenox7/wrp WRP - Web Rendering Proxy
  - lostgame 5y ago
    Oh, wow; thanks for the link, this is very cute.
- drewzero1 5y ago
  Not specific to the HTTPS issue, but useful for older browsers on lower-powered machines: Youtube creator and classic mac community contributor Sean/Action Retro has been running a proxy called FrogFind[0]. The project uses the Firefox "reader view" algorithm to serve stripped-down web pages for older machines. It's great for G3 and older machines that expect the web to be a bit more 90s. It really reminds me of using Google in/around 1998-99. [0] http://frogfind.com http://frogfind.com
killingmehardly 5y ago
mihaip 5y ago
https://oldweb.today/ https://oldweb.today/ gives you that experience, using some of the same building blocks.
- chefandy 5y ago
  Oldweb.today kicks ass. Great project. If you're scrolling by wondering whether it's worth putting in your list of sites to visit, definitely do it.
- Yhippa 5y ago
  Boy did I go down the rabbit hole today with this. I found so many sites from my past that I ended up looking up in the Internet Archive just now. I really miss the web from 25 years ago. Design was simpler and things loaded fast. The focus was on content, not chrome (and tracking the heck out of you). I know this is rose-colored glasses but hell, even interacting with the old Windows and Mac OSes was a breath of fresh air. There are things that show their age but there are also things that make it really easy for me to find my way around a computer. Thanks for the link. That was a great trip down memory lane. I wonder if we'll ever adopt some of that old stuff ever again.
  - saltminer 5y ago
    > things loaded fast Did they really, though? Or did we just have more patience for general slowness back then? Things were simpler, no doubt, but the computers were also much slower (if you didn't have much RAM, loading a webpage would probably result in paging to the disk), the network was slower (even if you were lucky enough to have a T1, you were probably connected to it via 10 Mbps half-duplex ethernet), the servers you connected to were slower... Don't get me wrong, I adore the simplicity and hackability of older systems, but I have a PowerMac G3, and even after maxing out the RAM at 768 MB (at launch, the max was 384 MB because there were no 256 MB DIMMs to test with), swapping the old 12 GB IDE HDD for a 32 GB CF card, fixing the ATI extensions to enable the dedicated GPU, and connecting it to a multi-gigabit network with symmetric gigabit fiber internet, there's only so much performance you can squeeze out of these things. Even loading 90s-era webpages on 90s hardware (with 2000s upgrades) is slower than loading many modern webpages on modern systems.

I was hoping I could use Netscape Navigator to go to Hacker News and post a comment from it, but it has no network connection. And I guess it probably wouldn't be able to HTTPS.

lostgame 5y ago

I’m sorry this is so vague, I’m in transit right now; so I’m a little lazy to try to Google this from my phone - but there is some sort of proxy-type thing for these old Macs that allows you to use the ‘modern web’, to an…extent? I think it kinda works the way Opera Mini does or something, if that makes sense? It does totally solve the HTTPS issue. You could easily access HN using this method through even Netscape. There is also - I want to say - again pardon me if I’m wrong here, but I believe it’s called ‘Classzilla’? This is for - AFAIK - at least MacOS 9 (you might be screwed for 8, though) and does old.Reddit.com pretty okay for me as long as I have enough RAM in the unit, so it should also handle HN totally fine. I actually think it - along with, unfortunately; an absolutely incredible modern Firefox port for PPC Macs running 10.4/10.5 called ‘TenFourFox’, are now abandoned - but very much still available. It was a pretty big hit to the (admittedly small) PPC Mac community when it happened. I personally still use TenFourFox almost every day as I use my PPC Mac collection often for various tasks, especially my quad G5 that has 16GB(!) RAM. (Yeah, a PPC Mac with I believe 2 processors/4 G5 cores at 2.5(?)ghz, 2 512 GB SSD’s and 16GB of RAM. There is literally no better way to experience the heights of the PPC Mac days. So cool.)

simulate-me 5y ago
I believe some people have written WASM networking using a WebRTC data channel as the transport.
ivank 5y ago
https://github.com/tenox7/wrp https://github.com/tenox7/wrp WRP - Web Rendering Proxy
- lostgame 5y ago
  Oh, wow; thanks for the link, this is very cute.
drewzero1 5y ago
Not specific to the HTTPS issue, but useful for older browsers on lower-powered machines: Youtube creator and classic mac community contributor Sean/Action Retro has been running a proxy called FrogFind[0]. The project uses the Firefox "reader view" algorithm to serve stripped-down web pages for older machines. It's great for G3 and older machines that expect the web to be a bit more 90s. It really reminds me of using Google in/around 1998-99. [0] http://frogfind.com http://frogfind.com

killingmehardly 5y ago

mihaip 5y ago

https://oldweb.today/ https://oldweb.today/ gives you that experience, using some of the same building blocks.

chefandy 5y ago
Oldweb.today kicks ass. Great project. If you're scrolling by wondering whether it's worth putting in your list of sites to visit, definitely do it.
Yhippa 5y ago
Boy did I go down the rabbit hole today with this. I found so many sites from my past that I ended up looking up in the Internet Archive just now. I really miss the web from 25 years ago. Design was simpler and things loaded fast. The focus was on content, not chrome (and tracking the heck out of you). I know this is rose-colored glasses but hell, even interacting with the old Windows and Mac OSes was a breath of fresh air. There are things that show their age but there are also things that make it really easy for me to find my way around a computer. Thanks for the link. That was a great trip down memory lane. I wonder if we'll ever adopt some of that old stuff ever again.
- saltminer 5y ago
  > things loaded fast Did they really, though? Or did we just have more patience for general slowness back then? Things were simpler, no doubt, but the computers were also much slower (if you didn't have much RAM, loading a webpage would probably result in paging to the disk), the network was slower (even if you were lucky enough to have a T1, you were probably connected to it via 10 Mbps half-duplex ethernet), the servers you connected to were slower... Don't get me wrong, I adore the simplicity and hackability of older systems, but I have a PowerMac G3, and even after maxing out the RAM at 768 MB (at launch, the max was 384 MB because there were no 256 MB DIMMs to test with), swapping the old 12 GB IDE HDD for a 32 GB CF card, fixing the ATI extensions to enable the dedicated GPU, and connecting it to a multi-gigabit network with symmetric gigabit fiber internet, there's only so much performance you can squeeze out of these things. Even loading 90s-era webpages on 90s hardware (with 2000s upgrades) is slower than loading many modern webpages on modern systems.